Five most useful apps for travel

Five tools that could easily make your business travel much more efficient, productive, and successful.

Travel, unfortunately, doesn't always mean vacation. In
fact, for most people within the corporate world, travel means on thing –
business. The very thought of having to travel for business makes most cringe.
You're away from your family, familiar surroundings, the amenities of normalcy
- it can send you into a frenzy of anxiety. Add to the already daunting list,
the idea that anything can cause your trip to be a miserable failure, and you
can see why there are so many apps and services available that promise to make
your business travel life a whole lot easier.

But, out of the plethora of available applications, which
offer the services and features you need? Let's take a look at five tools that
could easily make your business travel much more efficient, productive, and
successful.

Five Apps

1. Plnnr

Plnnr is a web-based
itinerary tool that can save you time on trip planning. With a few clicks you
can quickly get a full itinerary with routes, attractions, places to eat – all
using your hotel as a central point of focus. The entire set up of your trip is
simple and focuses on what you want. Although much of Plnnr is centered on
vacation travel, it's a great place to start – especially when your business travel
is taking you to new parts of the world. Need to find the best place for drinks
or food, it's all just a click or two away. But Plnnr doesn't just list out
those four- and five-star restaurants; it also maps out the routes from your
hotel. Plnnr is free to use and always at your fingertips, so long as you have
a web browser at the ready.

2. Packing List

Packing
List (Lite or Pro) is an Android app that allows you to create packing lists
from scratch, generate lists from previous saved lists, and even includes a
master list which you can use for a base-line. The feature list includes:
Save/use multiple lists, re-order categories, mass change for faster editing,
group lists by location/luggage, save lists on SD card, add
notes/quantity/weight to items, email/share your lists, and much more. If you're
one of those that always seems to struggle with the idea of exactly what to
take for a business trip, Packing List could certainly help. With this handy
app, you can even create lists for each business trip you take, so the act of
packing is just a matter of calling up the proper list and following the "instructions".
The Pro version ($1.50 USD) removes the advertisements and allows you to check
location weather and sync lists across devices.

3. Tripit

Tripit is a
nifty mobile app that helps you organize your travel. With this tool you can
forward hotel, airline, car rental, and restaurant confirmation emails to plans@tripit.com (from the same email you
used to create a Tripit account) and generate an instant itinerary that can be
accessed from your mobile device. You can manually set up trips or even allow
Tripit to automatically scan your Gmail account to find travel plans and
confirmations. Once Tripit finds those plans/confirmations, it will turn them
into Tripit itineraries. Even if you don't use the itinerary generator,
creating a trip manually is still quite easy and allows you to set up lodging,
meetings, activity, dining, and much more. The Pro version of the app
($49.00/year) adds real-time flight alerts, seat tracker, flight finder, refund
notifications, point tracker, and more.

4. Expensify

Expensify
makes keeping track of your business travel expenses a snap. With this handy
mobile app, you can capture receipts from the device camera, scan your receipt,
create and edit expenses on the go, manage your time and mileage, sync your
bank and credit cards, submit reports (PDF format) via email, and more.
Expensify features: Worldwide currency support, company expense policies,
offline mode, integrate with cloud storage, QuickBooks, Xero, SAP, NetSuite,
and more. You can even forward an itinerary (from the account email) to receipts@expensify.com to auto-generate a trip. If you're looking
for a business travel expense tool, you'll be hard-pressed to find one more
capable than Expensify.

5. AirBnB

AirBnB is what you
want if you're tired of staying in the same cookie-cutter hotels for every
business trip. With this service, you can book anything from bed and breakfasts
to castles (yes there are over 600 castles you can rent from) for your travel
stay. Instead of hooking up with corporate chains, you book with locally owned
(and individually owned) locations that offer every possible amenity. With
AirBnB you can rent from people in over 34,000 cities and in 192 countries.
What's best, you can read reviews of rentals from other travelers, so you know
exactly what you're getting into. If you're looking to turn your business trip
into a unique travel experience, this is what you want. The service is free,
the rentals are not – but you can find incredibly cheap deals all over the
world.

Bottom line

If you're a frequent flier, and you're looking to make all
those miles a bit easier, give one (or more) of these apps/services a try and
see if they don't add a little efficiency and joy to your business trips. No
matter what you do, or what service you use, always travel safely.

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About Jack Wallen

Jack Wallen is an award-winning writer for TechRepublic and Linux.com. He’s an avid promoter of open source and the voice of The Android Expert. For more news about Jack Wallen, visit his website getjackd.net.

Full Bio

Jack Wallen is an award-winning writer for TechRepublic and Linux.com. He’s an avid promoter of open source and the voice of The Android Expert. For more news about Jack Wallen, visit his website getjackd.net.

If you want a free flight tracker, I’d go with FlightView. It’s accurate, sends notifications if there’s a delay, cancellation, or change to the gate or baggage claim info. Only the pro version of TripIt comes with flight tracking – so you’ve got to pay for it.